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December 14, 1883
Late last night, the basement door burst open. I woke up with a start, sure that they’d come for me. That I was being captured and dragged back to Georgia.
Two other ex-slaves walked into the basement room. One of them carried a twentysomething ex-slave whose leg was bandaged but bleeding through. He laid him on the bed that had once been Jane’s as Mr. and Mrs. Sheridan hurried in to nurse his wound. I was too scared to ask what had happened. The injured young man shook violently and sweated all over the mattress. It didn’t take long before he passed away. It was infected, Mrs. Sheridan said.
The young man was shot as they’d made a getaway to the boat that would take them to the island. Somehow they’d made it this far. But he’d been unlucky enough to die in my basement.
The morale was low. Mr. Sheridan took the body somewhere and left me here with the men the deceased had left behind. After a very long silence, one of them said they were from Virginia. They were brothers, or at least they all had the same mother. I recognized the weight of what they’d lost and cried with them.
After a time, they told me they planned to head farther north tomorrow. They wouldn’t stop for anything. They invited me to go with them and said they would protect me and the baby. But I resisted. I feel a comfort in my little room beneath the earth. The baby and I are regaining our strength. And I still hold out hope that Jane and Virgil will contact me here when the time comes.
December 25, 1883
I was allowed upstairs for two minutes.
It’s Christmas Day, and the Sheridans have celebrated accordingly. They decorated a big tree with tinsel and candles and cooked a big meal. I could smell the yams and turkey from the basement, and my mouth watered.
Mrs. Sheridan wanted to show me how her children had all fallen asleep by the roaring fire in front of the Christmas tree. She’d spent so much time with my baby, and it was time that I see hers. It was true they looked adorable, snuggled up together beneath blankets, overstuffed with turkey. Mrs. Sheridan gave me a big platter of food to take downstairs with me, and I ate it slowly, trying to save it as long as I could.
I decided to name my baby Mary, after Jesus’s mother. It is truly because of him that I have found my way to these people. It is because of him that I am safe.
Chapter Twelve
Genevieve was two weeks old the day the historian came to Martha’s Vineyard. Amanda was torn. All she wanted was to stand in the dank basement with Sam and Grandpa Wes and watch the wall fall between this world and the past. But it destroyed her to leave her baby behind for more than a second.
“It’s going to be all right,” Audrey assured her. They were in the foyer of the Sunrise Cove. Audrey had a sleeping Genevieve wrapped against her chest. She wore her easily, with a typical Audrey-laissez-faire attitude, and reminded Amanda that she’d only be in the basement an hour at the most. “I’ll just be writing in the bistro,” Audrey reminded her. “Come up whenever you’re ready.”
Audrey disappeared in the bistro to take her typical seat near the window. A server followed her, then ducked back around to make Audrey’s tea and favorite grilled cheese. She was Sheridan royalty. Everyone always knew what she wanted.
Sam and Grandpa Wes chatted with the historian outside on the lawn. It was early May, a gorgeous sixty-five degrees, and Amanda wore a pair of flare jeans and a sweeping blouse. Her stomach was receding quicker than she’d anticipated, but she’d also bought a bigger pair of jeans just to feel comfortable. No use destroying her mental health over a pair of pants. (Looking back from a mother’s perspective, she couldn’t remember why she’d cared so much about being thin in the first place. There was so much else to think about.)
George Whitehead, the historian, had graduated from Harvard undergrad and had a masters from Cambridge and had been featured on The HISTORY Channel, in the Smithsonian, and at the Anthropology Museum in Mexico City. He wore a tweed suit and very small rectangular glasses that seemed to be more for aesthetics than use. He was maybe fifty years old.
“Dr. Whitehead, this is my granddaughter Amanda. She’s the lawyer I was telling you about,” Grandpa Wes introduced.
She shook his hand and was surprised at how warm and soft it was. “Pleasure to meet you. Thank you for coming so quickly. Sam said something about a newly discovered site by Boston?”
“It turned out to be a fluke if you can believe it,” Dr. Whitehead said with a laugh. “People want to believe they’ve discovered history so bad that they concoct all kinds of lies to support their stories. I don’t think they always know they’re lying until they’re in over their heads.”
“Is that right?” Grandpa Wes put his hands on his hips.
“People will do all kinds of things for fame and glory,” Dr. Whitehead said. “That’s one thing we’ve learned over centuries of studying human behavior. Hubris is the fall of man.”
There was that word again, Amanda thought. Hubris. During a game of Scrabble last night, she’d even managed to use it to get twenty-two points. She’d defeated Sam by five.
Dr. Whitehead cleaned his glasses with a paisley handkerchief. “It’s always good to have a lawyer on your side,” he said, giving Amanda a kind smile.
Amanda’s stomach lurched. Nobody but Susan knew about her suspended license. She wanted to tell Sam; she really did. But between baby snuggles and feedings and talk of the “mysterious room” in the Sunrise Cove, news of Amanda’s potential loss of career had slipped through the cracks. Was it a lie of omission? Or was it just Amanda’s fear?
Grandpa Wes, Sam, Amanda, and Dr. Whitehead donned construction hats and proceeded to the basement to meet with the construction crew Sam had initially hired to build the spa. With Dr. Whitehead’s guidance, they’d spent the better part of the morning ripping out the rest of the concrete wall that covered the wooden slats of the hidden one. Now that it was cleared, stones were piled in the corners, and even more dust coated the basement stairs. But the mossy wall was uncovered completely.
Dr. Whitehead paused in the middle of the basement and glared at the staircase. “Where is Bart? He said he was coming down here.”
A split second later came a man’s voice at the top of the steps. “I’m on my way! Had to swap out a lens.”
Dr. Whitehead breathed a sigh of relief as a thirty-something man with bottleneck glasses burst down the stairs. Around his neck hung a strap attached to a sleek video camera. Amanda had read over the paperwork and, together with Sam and Grandpa Wes, had agreed it was appropriate to film the event. Sam wanted to use it for promotional material down the line. Wes had confessed he really wanted to be on television.
Bart set up in the corner of the room so that Dr. Whitehead was the central figure, and Amanda, Grandpa Wes, and Sam hovered behind him. Dr. Whitehead spoke to the camera as though he spoke to a massive studio audience and even added a hint of an English accent, presumably picked up from his years at Cambridge. Amanda smiled to herself. Everyone on television was a fake.
